Retail shrink mostly comes from customers stealing, cashier sweet-hearting, and employee theft. Item substitution fraud occurring at Self-Service Checkout (SSCO) and Point-Of-Sale (POS) terminals is one of the key shrink issues. Perpetrators commit the fraud by checking out an expensive item (e.g., a bottle of bourbon) as a cheap produce item (e.g., banana). For example, rather than scanning a barcode of an item, the item is placed on a scale, an item type is keyed in or otherwise selected such as bananas, and the item is priced at checkout by weight rather than by the product barcode.
These types of fraud occur primarily at checkout terminal. However, modern retail outlets continually evolve to reduce operating expenses and to provide customers enhanced, or at least differentiated shopping experiences. To these ends, some retail outlets, such as supermarkets, big-box stores, and boutique grocers have begun placing weigh stations in shopping areas where items are sold by weight, such as produce, spices, candy, grains, and the like. These weigh stations include a scale and functions and devices to identify a product being weighed and a label printer to print labels to be affixed to weighed products to enable the products to be priced at checkout, e.g., barcodes, product identifier numbers. Customers are thereby able to choose exactly an amount they want to purchase and scales can even be removed from checkout terminals.
As new solutions are added to the retail environment, such as remote weigh stations, nefarious actors typically move quickly to discover and exploit vulnerabilities.